


Burning Bright

by trascendenza



Category: Touching Evil (2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-11
Updated: 2007-08-11
Packaged: 2017-10-04 06:32:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trascendenza/pseuds/trascendenza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>It's more like an inside joke the two of you just don't choose to share with the rest of the world.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Bright

This is how it starts: he kisses you as a joke. Or you pretend to think it's a joke, because when you consider that he might have done it out of pity, your mind slips right the hell off of that thought like oil on water. And he goes along with it, sloshing back another beer, his whole demeanor through the evening implying an exaggerated wink in your direction.

And, a few days later, he somehow makes the hard-on you get walking in on him buck naked (you don't even _ask_ what he was doing before you got there) not a big deal, even a little amusing. And when he does actually wink at you not long after you've come all over his sheets, you don't feel like he's laughing at you. Before, there was always a vague air of you being the butt of his joke, the object of his scorn.

It's almost as if, by touching him enough, by breathing in his scent and laughing at his inappropriate jokes that he doesn't even intend to be funny, by catching him when he stumbles over non-existent cracks in the sidewalk and letting him scream into your chest after a case has gone badly—it's as if, through all that, his complete lack of shame leaks through your skin, enshrouds you in a cloud where the two of you can exist like this, outside the normal parameters.

But what you still don't know is how he manages to make something that, really, should be at least _kind_ of serious (_Right?_, you wonder, _sleeping with a co-worker, keeping stuff secret, all that shit—shouldn't that be serious business?_), how he makes it into something more like an inside joke the two of you just don't choose to share with the rest of the world.

Creegan's funny like that.

*

This is how he tells you: en route to a triple slit-wrist and slit-neck suspected homicide. He's driving—though God knows why you let him, the way he hyperventilates at the stoplights—and then, without warning, he suddenly turns the full intensity of his freakishly focused stare state on you.

"You do know that I love you, right?"

But before you can sputter out something, or maybe to choke out an awkward laugh to cover up the sick, bottomed-out feeling in the pit of your stomach, he's turned back to look at the road, and starts talking about the nutritional value of Twinkies versus Ho-hos.

*

This is how you tell him: three months later, over the roar of a baseball game that neither of you is interested in watching, while he's got a hand down the back of your pants, popcorn scattered all through his hair, and an unbearable Creegan-smirk on his face.

You lean over and scream, "Yeah, I know, man," over the cheering crowd, not knowing you're going to say it until you do. The brim of your hat presses against his forehead, keeps your faces four inches apart—the only thing that stops you from reaching out and pushing him against the bright orange plastic seats and taking him right there, because you almost can't take it, can't take what you see when you look at him, almost can't take keeping it a secret anymore.

He shifts toward you, brings up both his hands and holds your head in them. The playfulness dissolves from his face in one great wash, and a painful openness you rarely let him show replaces it. He fits the brim of his hat snugly over yours and begins reciting.

"_And what shoulder and what art / Could twist the sinews of thy heart? / And when thy heart began to beat_—"

In a blur, you knock off the hats, and scramble forward, kissing him like this isn't the first time you've done it in public, practically bending him backwards over the cheap seats.

You can hear people seated above you gasp, cry out, and him murmuring, still reciting poetry into your mouth, and you laugh back into his, because it doesn't matter what what the fuck anyone else thinks when he makes you like this, free and wild, and a tiger, a tiger burning bright.


End file.
